16x16x16 LED cube project

Building 8x8x8 Led cube is quite challenging and time consuming task. But what about 16x16x16 LED cube. Would you dare to start one? Its 4096 LEDs hmm… RGB LEDs. Its like 3×4096=12288 uni-color LEDs. Quite a wiring job. Well students have almost completed one.

Controlling giant cube is also intense task. Standard microcontroller probably wont fit for it. So this one is controlled by FPGA (Xilinx Spartan-3). LEDs are controlled by using 48-bit shift registers – one per layer along with MOSFETs. Adding all components price goes up pretty fast. Currently cube is 16x16x8 size which already shows itself pretty well. Hopefully it will be finished and run at full capacity.